Keogh promotes use of the NHS Number

Tags: Data quality GP NHS Number Quality Safety Wales

09 Dec 2008

Professor Sir Bruce Keogh has written to all NHS chief executives and medical directors to promote wider use of the NHS Number.

In a letter, the NHS medical director tells chief executives that implementing the NHS Number is not just about data quality or finding the number to put on a record so that data sets are complete.

He says: “It is about facilitating safe and effective transfer of information across the system through NHS Connecting for Health. It fundamentally underpins our approach to clinical quality and patient safety.”

Sir Bruce, who is the senior responsible officer for the NHS Number Programme, says it was designed to provide support, guidance and assistance to healthcare organisations in achieving complete adoption of the NHS Number.

He thanks 19 organisations, including primary care trusts, GP practices and hospitals, that have worked with the NHS Number Programme over the past few months to share knowledge, experience and best practice.

The letter also encourages other organisations to get involved. “Only by gaining wider contributions are we able to validate the guidance and to gain a full insight into best practice,” the letter says.

In September, the National Patient Safety Agency issued a Safer Practice Notice that requires all NHS organisations in England and Wales to use the NHS Number as the national, unique patient identifier by September 2009.

Links

Sir Bruce Keogh’s letter

NPSA Safer Practice Notice

NHS Number Programme

Fiona Barr

Reader's Comments

Relax - take your time

09 Dec 08 10:12

'Promote' the NHS number - more than 10 years after its inception (in its current form)? Like it's a nice idea but somehow optional?

Any competent healthcare informatics project *begins* with a project to ensure a clean master patient index, unified across the organisation using the system.

How could NPfIT cost less and be scheduled in less time than the National ID Card project, when it embeds almost exactly the same requirement (i.e. clean and up to date national ID and basic demographics for every citizen) - before any NHS administrative or clinical functionality is bolted on?

NPfIT has not fallen at the first hurdle - it hasn't yet even tried to jump it.

Ned to make the process work between organisations.

10 Dec 08 08:12

From my perspective in a pathology laboratory which receives almost half it's work from primary care, the NHS number is a great idea for working between organistations. Unfortunately it stops at the idea stage. NHS number is almost universally present in primary care systems and seems usefull for referral to secondary care?

The reality is that unless the patient is already on one of our secondary care systems you might as well give me the national insurance number, drivers licence number or a lottery number. There is no way of checking in real time that the number actually belongs to the patient - If it's a hand written request form (as most still are!) there is quite a high probability that the NHS number (and even date of birth or address) actually belongs to someone else.

If we do manually add it to our systems and it was wrong then there is a problem with some GP systems which accept result messages on the basis of NHS number alone! Completely ignore the non-matching data which is also provided, surely not? Well actually Yes that is how some of the most popular systems handle incomming messages.

The only fully safe ways to use the NHS number between organisations require either fully electronic interchange or to have the whole local population pre-loaded on secondary care systems.

NHS Number for Babies

10 Dec 08 10:12

Am I correct in assuming that all babies are now getting an NHS number? I seem to remember that this project was hailed as a success some years ago. If so, in 50 - 60 years time when they start getting degenerative diseases with an associated demand for healthcare, the number problem will have been resolved.

And by then NPfIT might have delivered some systems that can take advantage of it!

AN identifier not THE identifier

15 Dec 08 15:12

People getting involved here that don't know the first thing about how systems talk to each other and have no appreciation of what goes on in our larger hospitals. We need to get on and treat patients and this means registering a patient so that a common number is propagated throughout systems. Sometimes this has to be done in the absence of an NHS number either because the patient does not have one (large numbers of people do not and will not) or is unconcious etc. There is a choice here whereby we could start to register all of those for some kind of phoney number whereby it is possibly dealt with later. This would create a mess of the national spine. The conclusion I have drawn is that the NHS number is AN identifier, not THE identifier for systems and in fact mandating it in these areas would introduce real risk due to the lack of integrity in the interfacing.

Done

16 Dec 08 12:12

The Personal Demographics Service is a national administrative database that fully integrates into local systems so that the NHS Number is used natively. The NHS Number Programme is building on these foundations.

For people without LSP systems, there's the Summary Care Record application and the Demographics Batch Service.

The tools are there. What's required is a willingness to use them.